I’m quite fond of Mercurial, despite (though perhaps partly because of) using Git daily for the last ten years.
The first DVCS I used was Darcs, which I liked; then I tried Mercurial and liked it even more. That was 2007; I didn’t get my first job in a “Git shop” until 2010.
I’ve always found the Mercurial UX to be more pleasant than Git. Little things like invoking commands with unique left-substring, or seeing inbound or outbound commits with a single memorable command.
I move between a couple different computers regularly: my old 12" PowerBook and the 15" MacBook Pro my job provides me with. Like all multi-computer users I periodically bump up against the challenges of what files (and versions) are where, especially when there’s work in progress.
To further complicate things, I also have an extra laptop running Ubuntu. And sometimes I just SSH to my web server from somebody else’s machine.
At work I still mostly use Subversion for version control. Its main selling points: stable, performs as expected, integrates nicely with Trac, holds all our old stuff (legacy inertia).
Note that “pain-free branching and merging” is not on that list. (And don’t give me the old “branching is cheap in svn!” line. It’s not about the branching, it’s about the merging.) A couple years ago I started also using Mercurial and plan to eventually replace svn with it entirely.
This has been going around – give people a peek at what commands you run most often. I ran this on my server, where I spend most of my shell time:
> history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s\n",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn|head
103 hg
81 cd
67 ll
29 ./manage.py
23 ab
21 re-ap
17 hgup
14 svn
13 cat
12 ls
Notes:
Mercurial has pushed my use of Subversion way down. I can’t remember what I was benchmarking with ab, but I’m sure it’s faster now!
Very cool news – Mercurial 1.0 has been released. See the announcement and the site for details. There are no earth-shaking individual changes in this release, just a long list of improvements that have been made since 0.9.5.
One of the new features is easy_install friendliness, so assuming you’ve got that installed, getting the new version of Mercurial is as easy as:
$ sudo easy_install http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/release/mercurial-1.0.tar.gz
If you want to be kind to the server, since it’s getting pounded today, you can do this instead in order to make your request via the Coral CDN:
Update: As of 2012, the primary Django repo is on GitHub. The mirror described in this post has been retired. I really enjoyed my participation in the last Django sprint, but prior commitments prevent me from participating in the PyCon Django sprint that begins today. On the chance that people may be taking advantage of my Mercurial mirror of the Django repository, I made a couple tweaks:
Increased the update frequency from hourly to every 15 minutes Added downloadable gzipped tarballs (about 2.
Update: As of 2012, the primary Django repo is on GitHub. The mirror described in this post has been retired. Just wanted to post a quick note that I’m now publishing an experimental Mercurial mirror of the Django source code repository, including all tags and branches and even the djangoproject.com website source itself. Tom Tobin at The Onion has been maintaining a similar mirror of Django trunk for a while (and very helpfully answered some of my questions in IRC), but I wanted to do the whole tree.